ButchA

Call me a little late to the game, but, I over this past week, I downloaded Strava both on my smartphone and on my laptop, linked it to Facebook, etc... and created an account/profile for myself.

As seen in the C&V forum and I think in the Over 50+ forum, I posted about how this past weekend, I enabled Stava on my phone and took off for a nice 18.45 mile ride for 1:09:22 which made for an avg of 16.0 mph speed. Great ride... I loved it...

However, when I double checked Strava, it said I burned 740 calories (6'0" and 210 lbs -- still a bit of a Clydesdale). But yet when I manually entered the exact same data into Map My Ride, just to see what it would show, it said I burned 1493 calories. Huh?

Granted, okay, yeah... Say what you want, but on some of the downhill sections, I did get a little goofy and grabbed the lower bars, got into a tuck, stopped pedalling, and coasted all the way down the hill as fast as I could go. Naturally, I didn't burn any calories that way, I would imagine... But it was fun doing it!

My main question: Which do you prefer? Strava or Map My Ride or some other type of fitness mapping app? For those on Strava: Look me up --- Butch Ammon.

UniChris

Calorie models using only speed over a course are going to be extremely crude. Perhaps they take climbs into account - but how do they know what sort of tires you have, how upright or tucked your riding position is, if you are riding into a headwind...

2cam16

I use both only because my Bryton is connected to Strava. So I mostly use MMR because I use several bikes and don't have a computer mount on all of them. I don't really care about the competition thing on Strava because I'm not riding to raise my ego level, I'm there to enjoy the rides and stay fit. If I did then I'd be stressing out on every ride because I hate losing. lol!
As for the calories, I get different numbers from both and the gap is huge so I just take the info of both with a grain of salt.

jp911

Personally, I take the estimated calorie burn with a grain of salt. I did notice that calories burned (according to Strava) changed dramatically when I started wearing a heart rate monitor regularly. They went up...because I'm also a clydesdale and my heart runs hard on all of the hills where I normally ride.

jgwilliams

I think Strava takes into account the fact that you'd be burning calories even if you were doing nothing and subtracts that from the total. I've noticed a similar discrepancy between Strava and RideWithGPS. However, as jp911 said, take it all with a pinch of salt. They're only estimates. You can't know the actual energy output without a power meter.

pdlamb

I wouldn't believe either of the calories burned calculations, but I'd disbelieve the lower one less. The calculations are notoriously inaccurate, and almost always high.

voyager1

gregf83 

Neither are particularly good at predicting caloric expenditure but for your example Strava looks close and MapMyRide is not believable. Strava puts your average power at around 180W which is reasonable for the speed you were riding. For MapMyRide to be accurate you would have needed to average 350W which is not reasonable.

ButchA

Thanks... I was wondering about that.

I should check out RideWithGPS. Hmmm.... Another app to download!

mstateglfr 

Why any app would be trusted for calorie burn is confusing.
even with age and weight, I wouldn't pay any attention to it.


my lezyne GPS auto uploads to Strava. The total climb on strava is always 40-60g less than what the GPS shows. Who knows which is right, i just care that distance is accurate, and it is.

point being- Strava takes actual captured data and changes it within the app. How many calories you burned could be correct or cpuld be inaccurate. Who knows.

ButchA

Very true... The best thing I quickly learned about Strava is it is NOT a memory hog on a smartphone, nor will it kill your battery power as badly as MapMyRide. Then again, the good feature about MMR is it's mapping/GPS capability. I mean, it's scary... I mean, the thing knows EXACTLY where you are! And it's routing, mileage, etc... calculations are dead on accurate too. But again, it doesn't have the same features as Strava like more accurate calories burned, watts, etc...

_ForceD_

bakerjw

My bike computers are Garmin Edge 500s and I wear a heart monitor as well as have sensors on all of my bikes.
I sync up through Garmin Connect which is tied to Strava and It looks like Strava pulls the calories from Garmin as both list the calories as the same.
I would hope that speed, grade, heart rate and cadence are taken into account in the calories burned calculation.
That would be a good question for Garmin.

wipekitty

I use Strava these days just because most of my cycling friends are on Strava. The competition thing can be somewhat fun from time to time. I used Map My Ride years ago but got really annoyed when Under Armour took it over and started sending me advertisements.

For a while, there was a bit of a glitch on Strava that showed my calories being way lower than they should be - like a fast, two hour ride with a bunch of climbing showed 350 calories burned. This has been corrected since I started using a HRM. Still, I take the calorie estimates with a grain of salt - they're just estimates.